Book Review: Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

For the last several years I have enjoyed reading the works of Richard Russo. Beginning with "Straight Man," then moving on what to what I suppose one could describe as the Upstate New York Series: The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool, Empire Falls, and now Bridge of Sighs. I have seen the movie version of Nobody's Fool, and watched it especially closely since it was filmed in my hometown of Beacon, NY. Which tells you a lot about Beacon, if you know anything about Russo's works.


The world of Russo is usually a small town on a river in upstate New York, but not as far north as Buffalo, a small town supported once by tanneries and factories but now populated by run down diners and emptying downtowns. The people are regular people- ones you would pass on the street or grow up next to or hear stories about from a cousin. I would say there is a similarity between this world and that of Alice McDermott characters.

Once in a while there is a grand catastrophe- fire or flood, but rarely anything truly operatic in scale. One of the things which is so amazing about these worlds is that they are about ordinary people in ordinary situations- yet the reader is stuck like a fly in amber in them. Many of the the takes take place in the fifties and beyond, so there is a sense of time gone by- there are racial tensions and beatings. Social classes are so well explicated that the books could be used to describe stratification in any Sociology 101 course.


The major theme is male relationships, usually father and son, not always dysfunctional-- just Russo showing us how each of these main characters (and mostly the books are from the first person point of view) was indelibly shaped by the father: for some it works out, for some not so much. At some pivotal point the narrator gains a vital understanding of the other main male character. In this world, women are as strong as men -- however, there are two types of people- either superhumanly strong in some way or weak as toothpicks.

Gender is not the issue, which since a bulk of the action takes place in the sixties and seventies, is interesting. What Womens' Liberation? Women are running businesses and working, managing family and careers without the fanfare of any struggle for equal rights. The glaring exception to this timeless quality of Russo's world is in the racial divide between the whites, blacks and hispanics. Plenty of bad happens because of it, but only in a peripheral way.


In The Risk Pool (which I just reread), the time is 1950s. Sam Hall has come home from the war, married and has a son and is a complete ne'er do well. It is not clear if this is a post or pre-war condition. He has a job working construction and another job as an alcoholic gambler. His son Ned is left to take care of his mother after the couple decide they cannot live together; the mother shoots Sam's car after he takes off with Ned for an afternoon of unauthorized fishing and Ned is in awe of her. Mother and son seem to be doing just fine until some unwise choices on the mother's part, leading to a breakdown. Again, it is unclear if her mental instability has to do with being married to Sam Hall or it too is a pre-existing condition.

After the mother is sent to the state mental hospital in Schenectedy, Sam takes Ned to live with him above a department store in a series of unfinished rooms. Lots of drinking and shenanigans on Sam's part lead Ned to understand that his father is a local legend for all the wrong reasons. After high school Ned gets out of Dodge but is eventually sucked back in due to Sam's legal problems. Fortuitous timing, since Ned has just bottomed out after a gambling spree of his own. It seems to be the proverbial wake up call.

Bridge of Sighs has many familiar elements with a few unexpected pinches along the way. The story is not as linear as other Russo stories, and caroms between first person point of view and third. There are two stories, technically: the world of Louis C. Lynch- "Lucy" and his boyhood companion, Bobby. Lynch's story is very typical: father is a milkman whose rosy view of the world contrasts with his mother's realist view. There are the big houses in the rich neighborhood with the unattainable girls, the low-rent neighborhoods with the inescapably alluring girls and never the twain shall meet. The Lynch family and their neighbors are in the middle.

A childhood trauma which is not really satisfyingly explained leaves Lucy with a lifelong proclivity to catatonic-like "spells." Much is made of this incident and his yearning for best-friend status with Bobby Marconi, the cool kid next door. The Marconi's have the abusive drunk father, delicate unstable mother and lots of trouble. These seem to be the regular main characters in a Russo book, especially when Bobby takes off after high school and we later learn, turns into acclaimed painter Robert Noonan. It is Noonan's third person view of Venice and later New York that provides some of the best yet most jarring moments in the book. This book is a lot more oblique than the others- a lot more is inferred or just unspoken. For me, it did not work well.

This is a very long book- 514 pages- yet in the reading it does not drag. But the last third is very unsettling, with revelations that come out of nowhere and are never truly explained. At the last you realize you have been snookered into reading a whole long tale by that most sneaky of literary devices- the unreliable narrator. As with many things, though- let's say the journey is more important than the destination.